My home wiring closet

[Eric Fazekas]

PIC 1: https://flic.kr/p/W1yXPk
PIC 2: https://flic.kr/p/W9DvS7

I built my home with a contractor, but did a lot of work myself including the network planning and wiring. It's a large ranch home that's about 110 feet long. I wired just about every room, some rooms with more than one drop. There's also a Lorex LNR400 capable of 16 POE cameras (so I wired 16 locations). Some of the cameras go to an 8 port POE switch in another room of the house and one Cat 5E connects the switch (although the 24 port switch recognizes that connection as a gigabit connection).

This closet is directly behind my living room TV so it also stores my cable box and Blu-ray player controlled through an IR repeater.

I knew I had to wire for the cameras so wiring Cat 6 to all the rooms seemed like a logical leap. I'm not a total nerd, but this was in my zone of knowing enough to be dangerous. I'm a IT Security guy by trade, not very technical, but I've dabbled while getting where I am.

Anyway, I'm really just sharing to show my solution. I know a lot of you could've /would've done better so be nice.

The monitor connects to the camera NVR.
There are two coax coming from the street, 1 RG11 feeds the powered cable amplifier, 1 RG6 goes straight to the cable modem.

I'll be happy to monitor for questions /comments.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Cool, love the tidy area

 

[razel]

I wish when my home was built that I had them do Ethernet wiring. No biggie though back then, CAT5e just got finalized, so I would have been stuck with pre gigabit wiring. Also back then PVC pipe usage in walls for wires wasn't popular. I'm much happier DIY anyways.

 

[Eric Fazekas]

I wish when my home was built that I had them do Ethernet wiring. No biggie though back then, CAT5e just got finalized, so I would have been stuck with pre gigabit wiring. Also back then PVC pipe usage in walls for wires wasn't popular. I'm much happier DIY anyways.

I put all this in (DIY) when the walls were just studs. I used "smurf tubes" (blue flexible conduit from Lowes) from the wall top plates in the attic down (left enough to stick up through the insulation) to the wiring boxes so I can replace/upgrade wires as necessary if I see fit to do so in the future. All my Ethernet wires in the attic are suspended out of the insulation and follow common paths back to the wiring closet. Kind of like make-shift cable trays using cable ties.

I did run 2" PVC down from the attic to the structured cabling box for the wire bundles and I also did it up from the crawlspace for the coax from the street and the coax from a lot of the TVs and if I run any future wiring up from the crawlspace instead of down from the attic. I actually had the electrician run all the coax for the cable TV, but I did all the terminations.

I found an additional benefit of having all my coax fed from this location. The first time my cable TV went out for a few days after a storm I purchased a HDTV antenna and mounted it in the attic facing Northwest towards Columbia, SC (I also pick up Charlotte). I ran the coax from that back to this room (down the aforementioned PVC pipe) and when the cable goes out now I just remove the feed from the street and hook up the wire from the HDTV antenna and all my TVs can take advantage of it.

I had a lot of time to think about this while the house was being planned and built. I actually did most of the Ethernet over Christmas in 2014 (extra time off from work).

 

[razel]

Nice.. that is the future. The Internet is not going away. Getting your home wired up is well worth the work you'll put in. It's also the best way to solve WiFi issues. Wired up MESH in a well wired home.

 

[Eric Fazekas]

Nice.. that is the future. The Internet is not going away. Getting your home wired up is well worth the work you'll put in. It's also the best way to solve WiFi issues. Wired up MESH in a well wired home.

I have the LinkSys Velop with three wired nodes (Main +2) and one wireless node in a detached garage that connects through one of the wired nodes back to this closet. I have mixed reviews with the Velop. It definitely gives me good coverage and almost seamless handoffs, but I didn't like it as my sole wireless router solution. I went back to having a separate main wireless router (currently LinkSys WRT1200AC) that handles DHCP, connects to my cable modem, etc. The Velop system relies on an App-only interface and it was not reporting all the clients connected. The last straw was the main node started losing access every other day or so. I think there was some sort of IP conflict or loss, but the App-only interface wouldn't let me troubleshoot sufficiently. At least with other routers I can connect my laptop, plug in the local IP and it will talk to me.

The wired home has allowed me to do other things like:
1) Place storage devices in any room (connected via Ethernet) rather than only by the router/switch
2) Place other devices like my Arlo Pro router in any room more central to my camera placement rather than central to the house
3) Utilize a HDMI over Ethernet device (and IR repeater) to send the output from my DVR to any television in the house

With the connected wired Velop system, when I look at the network map in the WRT1200AC, most of the time all my devices report as connected via Ethernet. If a device is connected to the network via a Velop node that is wired, it shows up as Ethernet connected.